This week World Can’t Wait will be running a full-page advocacy ad in The New York Times, “the paper of record.”

This major statement calling for Guantanamo’s closure, an end to torture and to the attacks on fundamental civil liberties could not be timelier. It will be published very close in time to Obama’s nationwide speech this Thursday in which he is expected to defend his drone and detention policies.

The GTMO prisoners on hunger strike have passed 100 days in their strike and their lives hang in the balance. The battle to shut down Guantanamo is also part of a larger picture, which the statement also speaks directly to: you cannot separate GTMO from the overall so-called “war on terror.”

The WCW statement has already been signed by over 1100 people from all walks of life, including a truly impressive, sizable, and growing list of famous and highly respected individuals such as Cornel West, Glenn Greenwald, Alice Walker, Daniel Ellsberg, Michael Moore, S. Brian Willson, Noam Chomsky, Ray McGovern, M. Cherif Bassiouni (the “godfather of international law”), Mark Ruffalo, Moby, Bianca Jagger, Wallace Shawn, Dave Eggers, Oliver Stone, Ron Kovic, Tom Morello, Andy Worthington, Denis Haliday (former UN Assistant Secretary-General), Junot Diaz, Carl Dix, Cindy Sheehan, Boots Reilly, Rev. Michael Lerner, Harper’s Editor Jeff Sharlet, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, Outernational, Le Tigre, attorneys for GTMO detainees, and so on. See here for the names as of this writing.

This growing list of endorsers is extremely significant for a number of reasons.

One is that the statement they have signed and donated to is not worded in a “safe way,” designed so as not to ruffle any feathers; it doesn’t mince words. It speaks the hard truth and it is giving voice to widespread sentiments because it concentrates what people know to be true and raises it up in a call to action.

People are endorsing the statement and calling on others who they know to join in this fight because they recognize the imperativeness of action and grasp the gravity of the situation. They are acting upon the understanding that the situation will not change unless people of conscience step forward and demand justice. Simply reminding Obama of his promises of six years ago to close GTMO, end torture, and restore habeas corpus, has not worked. Electing this man who promised to change things has obviously not worked in ending the policies that Obama decried and campaigned against while running for office, but once winning the election proceeded to embrace and defend, even while rhetorically claiming to do the opposite.

I am the principal author of the statement and want to briefly speak to the statement’s objective.

We aim to create a political situation in which Obama feels that he has no choice but to close Guantanamo and can no longer afford to put its closure off into some indefinite future. For that situation to develop an alternative moral authority has to emerge and contend for the people’s allegiance. The growing number of signatories to the ad and their leadership role in the larger society are a sign that this is coming into nascent being.

What we aim to do can be analogized to a not well-known variation of the famous Milgram Experiment. As many people know, the Milgram Experiment was inspired by the Nazis’ success in getting Germans to go along with atrocities. The experiment was based on a hypothesis that there was something about Germans that made them more susceptible to following orders and not questioning fascists. It was pilot tested by Milgram in America with the intention to take it to Germany.

Stanley Milgram found, however, that Americans were just as willing to follow orders to hurt and potentially kill strangers. He never took the experiment to Germany because he had found the answer here at home. The experiment was designed to see how willing people were to follow authority and how far they would go in inflicting electrical shocks to a stranger in another room when asked to by a person in a gray coat and a clipboard, when they could hear the agony and shouts of the person who was being shocked that he had a “heart condition” and yelled repeatedly “Let me out! Let me out!”

In this specific, not well-known, variant of his experiment,

[T]hree teachers (two actors and a real subject) administered a test and [electrical] shocks [to the subject in another room]. When the two actors disobeyed the experimenter and refused to go beyond a certain shock level, thirty-six of forty subjects joined their disobedient peers and refused as well.[*]

Let me repeat that result: thirty-six out of forty people joined the rebellion of refusing the orders to continue shocking the stranger in the next room. In other words, when two others (confederates or actors) were brought into the room to administer shocks, instead of just one real subject in the room by himself or herself, and when these two actors refused to continue dealing potentially lethal shocks to the stranger in the other room, the vast majority of real subject/shockers also refused. This is in stark contrast to the main variation of the experiment in which 63% obeyed and took the shocks to the highest possible level, marked in the experiment on the machine as “X X X”, two stops higher than “Danger: Severe Shock.”

We are participants in a society-wide experiment like the Milgram Experiment. We are bringing into being an alternative moral authority that takes the moral high ground against those in authority such as Obama who are telling us with honeyed words that we should endorse the ongoing use of assassinations by drones, preventive and indefinite detentions without charges, and torture. We refuse to follow those orders and will lead others in rebellion against them. The question is being posed now and in the coming weeks, months, and years: whose stance wins out in the larger society? Those who use torture and kill thousands with drones, or those who demand that all peoples be treated justly and fairly? Will fear win out, or will justice prevail?

[*] Stanley Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience,” Harper’s, December 1973, 62-77. The article can be found also at “The Perils of Obedience,” http://home.swbell.net/revscat/perilsOfObedience.html, accessed February 14, 2011.

Dennis Loo is Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is a Harvard honors graduate in Government and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of “Globalization and the Demolition of Society” and Co-Editor/Author of “Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney”. Website: Dr. Dennis Loo

It is the one-party state creating a smoke screen, diverting attention from the real issues of domestic policy. Divide and conquer, always keep’em guessing, always leave’em laughing. Jack Lew is a former hedge fund manager for Citigroup and manager of its alternative investments unit, with oversight over Citigroup’s subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Hong Kong and he’s the new Treasury Secretary.

Sally Jewell worked for Mobil as an engineer in the oil fields of Oklahoma from 1978 to 1981. From there she moved on to banking at Security Pacific and West One Bank, before moving on to the Titanic disaster of modern banking, the ill-fated S.S. Washington Mutual. Jewell escaped the disaster by jumping ship as the iceberg approached, moving on to become the CEO of REI sporting goods. She’s the Secretary of the Interior now and her qualifications for the job are based solely on chairing several green committees, versus a twenty-plus-year career in oil, finance and banking. Who would a thunk it; an oil engineer with background in banking and the Republicans said what?

The Secretary of Agriculture, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, was named Governor of the year by the lobbying group, Biotechnology Industry Organization. This after Tom founded and chaired the Governor’s Biotechnology Partnership. Let’s forget Vilsack is in the pocket of agribusiness; he’s what we’d call on the street, a bag man. Vilsack approved a 15 cent tax, per live Christmas tree. The tax had been a result of three years of lobbying by the Christmas tree industry. What was the purpose of the tax? Was it to aid the unfortunate or to buy meals for the hungry during the holidays? No, the purpose of the tax was to fund an advertising program by the Department of Agriculture, promoting the sale of live Christmas trees. It is classic Corporate Fascism; industry prompts government policy to tax the populace, for the needs of the corporation.

Barack Obama never had the sympathies of the right, but he did have the good will of the middle and of the Left. Very quickly, Barack Obama disappointed, as the diehards wanted to take a wait-and-see attitude. Hope and Change degenerated into disappointment and disillusionment; not just with Obama, but with the system in its entirety. The two-party system resembles two dogs fighting over one piece of meat; growling and scrapping in a winner-take-all grudge match. As cunning as they are, they are humans after all, only appearing to act as dogs and with their cunning, it is altogether a better piece of performance art, if they only pretend to fight and split the meal backstage.

There is an unspoken belief that Capitalism and Democracy are somehow chained to the public good — they aren’t. Capitalism is about making money and maximizing profit; public good isn’t a pillar of Capitalism and public good isn’t a pillar of Democracy either. If they were, I wouldn’t be writing this and you, wouldn’t be reading it. Democracy is the alleged public control of government, but first, you must take control of the party which selects the candidates.

Supporting the American two-party system is like pretending to be half blind, believing one side corrupt and morally bankrupt, while the other side has just a few bad apples, disgracing the nobles. Forced to defend a Larry Craig or an Anthony Weiner? Just imagine you have a six figure income and an easy job. You can take care of your family, provide them with great government-paid healthcare benefits and, if you don’t screw up, it could lead to even more money in the future. That’s the key, don’t screw up. So would you put pictures of your dick on the internet; would that be considered screwing up? Would you consider soliciting other men for sex in the airport men’s room; would that be considered screwing up?

It has nothing to do with sexual preferences; it’s about being at work. About the personal responsibilities of separating work and play with only an implied understanding of doing the public good. This list of offenders rolls on forever, as incumbents keep getting re-elected, no matter how angry the public gets. There is no office of public good in the United States. No room where honorable individuals debate the merits versus the cost. In Norway, a state oil company does all the drilling with safety as their priority. The world’s oil companies bid to buy the oil and the revenue goes into a national trust fund. Politicians can spend the interest from the fund, but not the principal.

Here in America, Barack Obama wants to cut lease rates for oil companies drilling on Federal lands. The President claims this policy will encourage oil development, without saying exactly why that idea is superior to a competing idea — investing in clean renewable energy, like Germany has. The new Secretary of Defense is a lifelong Republican, who co-founded Vanguard Cellular, making himself a multimillionaire. He was also the president of the investment banking firm, The McCarthy Group, and was the CEO of American Information Systems, later re-named Election Systems & Software.

After serving twelve years in the Senate, Chuck Hagel served time in right-wing think-tanks with the likes of Brent Scowcroft and Richard Lugar. Hagel serves on the board of Directors of Chevron Corporation. Think about that, the Secretary of Defense is an oil company executive with investment banking experience. The Secretary of the Interior is an oil company engineer and career investment banker. The Secretary of Agriculture was named Governor of the year by a Monsanto funded lobbying group. Benghazi! Benghazi! Scandal! Murder! Treason! Outrage! Democrats! Republicans!

All right before your eyes; presto–chango! The corporate police state is in full flower, as the media obsesses ad-nausea for endless hours of infotainment; the actual culprits walk between the raindrops. As America’s only native criminal class robs the national treasury, like looters at the Wal-Mart and dare call it Democracy — and so, here we are.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies – the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. ~ Aldous Huxley

About the Author: David Glenn Cox is a senior staff writer for TLR and an award winning author and musician; he is the author of the novel, “The Servants of Pilate”.

A professor of medicine is paid $2,000 to hawk an expensive drug at dinner and has an unwritten, but well known, quid pro quo arrangement with that pharmaceutical company to prescribe their drug as part of this well understood agreement. Some of these paid speakers will prescribe a drug that will ultimately cost the patient, or taxpayers, as much as a few thousand dollars more for each year, for each patient prescribed, when compared to its generic equivalent.  A top doctor might therefore prescribe 1,000 patients a drug that could have been prescribed a generic that cost pennies. Do the math and you’ll realize that this lecture “scam” just cost the healthcare system more than a million dollars!  Who is the drug dealer here? Who will penalize the sick and the elderly more?

Unlike the Marijuana dealer, the doctor’s patients did not seek out this drug, they didn’t request it, and moreover, if they realized there were alternative drugs, they would not be happy to pay for it. And yet, it is the Marijuana dealer that goes to jail and the doctor that is regarded as a compassionate caregiver.

In 2012 a cardiologist practicing in New York was arrested for allegedly selling prescription drugs in exchange for his permission to “bill their insurance providers for unnecessary tests.” Shortly after his arrest I saw two of his patients in my office, both with congestive heart failure (CHF), who were treated by this doctor before his arrest. Both of them were prescribed a drug called Bystolic as part of their therapy. Bystolic, is a drug that belongs to the beta-blocker class and is a brand name drug, marketed in the US by Forest Pharmaceuticals.  It has never received FDA approval for the treatment of congestive heart failure.

The two beta-blocker drugs commonly used to treat CHF, and approved for that use, Carvedilol and Metoprolol Succinate, are available as generic drugs and cost a fraction of what Bystolic sells for. Both patients told me it was a great expense for them, paying an additional $60 dollars each month, compared to an appropriate beta blocker like Carvedilol. With the click of my pen, they received the better drug and saved almost $700 for a year’s supply.

This doctor might have been arrested for selling prescription Oxycodone to a willing participant, but will receive no penalty for defrauding patients who got the wrong drug for their heart failure; a drug that not only cost his patients money but may have cost some of his patient’s lives. Bystolic has not been established to help patients, with CHF, and so patients with that disease who were prescribed that drug not only paid more money for it but also may have paid the ultimate price. While I have no proof of whether this doctor received any form of remuneration from Forest Labs I can’t help be suspicious that he did.

This year I saw a patient whose cardiologist, a man well known in the cardiology community and a full professor of medicine at a top university, had retired. For the past ten years this patient has been treated for his hypertension with a drug named Tarka that was marketed here by Sanofi-Aventis. This drug, he told me, cost him $90 dollars in co-pay every three months (it would cost around $150 dollars every month for someone without insurance) or $3,600 dollars in total for the past ten years. It’s one of the most expensive medications marketed for hypertension and since almost every good drug used for hypertension is now generic and costs as little as $4 dollars a month without insurance (sometimes even less for those with a prescription drug plan), I’ve never prescribed it. This patient would later tell me that he paid $5 dollars for a three month supply of the generic medication I prescribed. His blood pressure remains well controlled on an inexpensive, every bit as good, generic medication.

Many of you likely read last month, that the US Department of Justice filed a complaint against Norvartis Corporation for what they believe were “kickbacks to doctors to induce them to prescribe Novartis pharmaceutical products that were reimbursed by federal health care programs… The payments and lavish dinners given to the doctors were, in reality, kickbacks to the speakers and attendees to induce them to write prescriptions for Novartis drugs,” the DOJ said in the press release.

But what about the physicians who are involved? What about some of the top doctors, the elite physicians who are professors of medicine and in charge of teaching medical students and residents, who are just as guilty as Novartis; guilty of manipulating patients into accepting costly prescription drugs? It’s time for these physicians to be held accountable for their duplicitous behavior and especially, for making medical decisions based on their own monetary gain, at the expense of their patients’ health and pocketbooks.

Dr. Evan S. Levine is a cardiologist in New York and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center – Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is also the author of the book “What Your Doctor Won’t (or can’t) Tell You”. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and children.

I am not generally one to side with the big corporations, but this time I do. Not because I care about their profits. They could and should all go to perdition as far as I am concerned. But as a poor person on the SNAP program in California, I do not want my freedom to engage in otherwise lawful behavior to be controlled by the government.

There have always been efforts to get the poor to change their behavior through public and private programs that assume people are poor because they are somehow inferior; that they have lower intelligence, bad habits or bad morals and they need to be restrained by their betters. A particularly egregious example of this attitude reared its ugly head whenever a social worker would barge into the home of a woman on welfare in search of evidence that she was living with a man who could be supporting her. The attempts to restrict purchases made with food stamps just extend the long history of degrading “supervision” of the poor.

My husband and I have been on SNAP for a year. As is typical of Federal programs, SNAP works best for people who make an even amount of income throughout the year. Unfortunately, that’s not our situation. David’s work is heavily seasonal and our allotment was cut heading into the winter months because he showed an increase in income in the fall, even though he provided proof that his hours would be severely slashed in the winter. We would prefer not to have to rely on this program, which requires us to report quarterly (soon to be semiannually) every jot and tittle of our finances in return for the whopping sum of $285-367 dollars a month. (Is the Pentagon or Homeland Security so tightly monitored for their appropriations?) But as long as David’s hours are restricted to part-time by city budget constraints and pay for journalism keeps being hit or miss (and always low) for me, we do what we have to do.

We are definitely eating better since we abandoned food banks to join SNAP. We take advantage of the fact that our local farmers’ market takes our SNAP card. We generally avoid HFCS and chemicals we can’t pronounce. But there are times we buy sodas, chips and candy bars with SNAP without guilt. We should not have to give up simple choices our more financially fortunate neighbors have available.

You may think I am crazy to trumpet the opportunity to eat candy bars and chips as some sort of sacred choice, but the issue here is one of equality and freedom, and those are sacred. All Americans should have the same freedom to make decisions about their own lives, even if others would not agree with those decisions. One’s degree of freedom and self determination should not depend on the amount of money one has nor whether the source of one’s income is family wealth, a paycheck or a government benefit.

Rather than further restricting what people can buy, SNAP should expand to include energy drinks, which are currently banned from the program because they are considered “supplements,” in other words, because they have vitamins and minerals added. So the irony is that someone on SNAP can buy a soda such as Coca-Cola, which is merely fizzy water with color and sugar (or HFCS), but cannot buy a “Monster” energy drink or a “Vitamin Water” because they have supplemental vitamins and minerals. There has been a lot of criticism of such drinks of late: Too much caffeine, too much sugar, etc , etc. But you have to admit that at least there are vitamins and minerals added to these drinks that are not present in traditional sodas, so they should be somewhat better for you than sodas. Why aren’t they part of the program? Perhaps certain legislators don’t want the poor taking too many vitamins?

The food stamp program has always banned “hot foods ready to eat”. This was done because when the program was first proposed, opponents raised the specter of poor people going to fine dining restaurants on the taxpayers’ dime. It was another version of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen. This ban has resulted in such anomalies as the fact that I can go to the farmers’ market and buy a frozen package of Donna’s Tamales to cook at home, but I cannot buy a hot Donna’s Tamale to eat at the market — exactly same product. But there you have it: Stupidity in the name of controlling the (supposed) behavior of the poor. The notion that poor people should not eat out is ridiculous. Like everyone else, we go out and sometimes get hungry while we are out. Given the predations of capitalism so rife in the US (and the world) today, most people are becoming us. So don’t be so judgmental of our activities.

There are much better ways to improve the nutrition of the growing number of America’s poor than limiting their freedom of choice. The first step is to halt the subsidies that make “junk food” a better buy in terms of calories per dollar than “real food”. The second step is to make fresh food more easily available in poor neighborhoods that have plenty of expensive corner convenience stores offering highly processed food, but a dearth of genuine grocery stores. Nutritional education, from teaching through gardens on public school grounds, to free or low cost cooking classes in grocery stores and adult education centers, will go a long way toward improving the eating habits of the poor.

But we really should focus on improving everyone’s nutrition, rather than controlling the poor. We would all benefit by examining the price differential between vegan or vegetarian alternatives to meat. I went to my local Whole Foods Market recently to buy the ingredients for vegetarian tacos. A 12 oz. package of veggie protein meat substitute was $3.99 ON SALE. (It’s usually $4.69) A one-pound package of 80/20 ground beef at my local Trader Joe’s is $2.69 everyday. If you are of limited means, whether or not you are on SNAP, which item would be the economically rational one to buy?

Red meat has a bad health rep, aside from scandals such as “pink slime” and “downer” cows in the feed lots. Shall legislatures ban SNAP enrollees from buying hamburger meat? How about chicken? Poultry is allegedly healthier fare than red meat. But the Food and Drug Administration—FDA—allows growers to add ARSENIC to feed for chickens, turkeys and hogs. (Pork, the other white meat!)

According to the Center for Food Safety:

Arsenic is commonly added to poultry feed for the FDA-approved purposes of inducing faster weight gain on less feed, and creating the perceived appearance of a healthy color in meat from chickens, turkeys and hogs. Yet new studies increasingly link these practices to serious human health problems.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the CDC—arsenic is known to be a human carcinogen (cancer-causing agent). Shall the poor be forbidden poultry and pork as unhealthy?

What about mercury in fish? In December 2012, the Huffington Post carried an article about reports by the Bodiversity Research Institute and an international coalition of environmental groups called the Zero Mercury Working Group that said mercury contamination of seafood was on the rise globally and that smaller amounts are more harmful than previously thought.

Those reports did not consider the radiation in the Pacific from Fukushima or the damage to seafood in the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The number of news reports about E. coli in vegetables, and salmonella in eggs, is growing.

Although the general quality and cost of our food is a societal concern, the ultimate decision of what to eat must rest with individuals. There are fewer decisions more personal than food. Even if the US cleans up its food act (ha!) people, including the poor, will still want comfort food now and then. A carrot stick or an apple will never surpass a candy bar or ice cream, both of which can be organic, too, as comfort food. If the government, by way of a social program, is willing to deprive a person of a simple choice because that person is poor and dependent on government help, then it is showing a genuine lack of concern for the quality of life of some of the neediest Americans. Food choices are part of our freedom; perhaps the SNAP restrictions are something we should not stomach.

Kellia Ramares-Watson is an independent journalist in Oakland, CA. Kellia is an advocate of demonetization and the gift economy, and is active on an international email discussion list of those subjects. She can be reached by email at: theendofmoney@gmail.com

In this talk Loo begins by honing in on the philosophical foundation of neoliberalism and then traces the consequences of that philosophy in two major arenas: its provoking of disasters and its undermining of the basis for the broad sections of the people to cooperate peacefully with authority, creating the necessity for authority to adopt authoritarian measures vis a vis the people (while still giving lip service to the “rule of law,” “democracy,” and “liberty”).

In brief, neoliberalism believes that “reality” is determined through political, military, and economic might, not objective reality separate from human perception. Neoliberals believe that they can make real what they want to make real and that through their power they can obliterate any other “realities” and views. This extreme position is something that neoliberals share with religious fundamentalists and postmodernists.

In the Q &A after his talk several different issues were raised, such as the complexity of the problems we face relative to the forces in play and whether or not Loo’s critique of postmodernism’s sharing of the same epistemology as neoliberals and religious fundamentalists is necessary and/or warranted. In the first vein, one professor argued that Loo’s critique of postmodernism was unnecessary to his larger project of critiquing neoliberalism. Another person in the audience who teaches in the History Department objected that the three movements are different: while neoliberalism declares what reality is, as do religious fundamentalists, postmodernist historians say that there is no privileged interpretation of history: all interpretations of history are equally valid.

The problem with this postmodernist view, as Loo put it, is that it hampers postmodernists and those influenced by postmodernism – both inside and outside the academy – from engaging in activities in the real world and leaves you unable to challenge decisively the perspectives of neoliberals or religious fundamentalists since all perspectives are equally “valid.” If there is no independent criterion to compare one’s interpretation to – empirical facts – then there is no basis on which to decide what is true or at least truer or not. Debates about what should be done in public affairs and private matters – Did Iraq have anything to do with 9/11? Does Iran have a nuclear weapons program? Is abortion an indispensible right or murder? Is torture real and should it be halted and torturers prosecuted or do the people being held at Gitmo have power over their lives? And so on – become impossible to settle and can only be “settled” by one’s preferred way of seeing. Fragmentation can only result. Reason is thrown out the window.

While the political stance of postmodernists is generally at odds with neoliberalism and religious fundamentalism, postmodernists are hamstrung in their opposition to the latter two by their rejection of any independent verifiable criterion outside of one’s own or one’s group’s interpretation.

It is impossible to determine and agree upon facts and the best interpretation of those facts if you have abandoned the idea that facts actually exist. As someone that Loo cites during the Q &A put it, he would love to be asked at a postmodernist conference by an attendee where the hotel parking lot is so that he can reply: “It’s wherever you want it to be.” As a professor in the audience put it in the aftermath of the event, neoliberals, religious fundamentalists, and postmodernists all take a “step back” from their philosophical positions since they cannot actually live their lives fully consistent to their philosophy. We live in a materially real world after all.
 

Thank you for inviting me.

I am going to be discussing today certain parts of the arguments that I lay out in my book Globalization and the Demolition of Society.

Let me begin by defining “neoliberalism”: neoliberalism (NL) is a doctrine based upon liberalism in the Adam Smith sense – the best society is achieved by letting market forces rule both public affairs and private matters. One of this paradigm’s assumptions is that everyone in society is interested in maximizing personal monetary gain. Another is that personal autonomy is the pinnacle of human development. Liberty, according to neoliberalism’s godfather Frederick Hayek, is the ability of the individual to do whatever they want, regardless of what others think, and thus by implication, regardless of what objective reality allows. Neoliberals hold that any attempts to seek the public good or protect the common interest are foolish and counter-productive. The common good, to the extent that they even believe that there is such a thing, is obtained through everyone pursuing his or her personal self-interest, which is equated with material opulence.

As Maggie Thatcher, who was buried last week, and who as the British Prime Minister beginning in 1979 was the first major first world leader to explicitly seek to institute neoliberal policies, put it: there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families. Thus, in the neoliberal view, there is nothing but the individual and that individual’s immediate family.

This view that there is no such thing as the entity that I and many of the rest of you devote our careers to studying – society – is the philosophical foundation for what I argue is the most dangerous movement in history.

Here is an overview of what I’ll cover in my prepared remarks.

I’m going to dissect further the philosophic foundation for neoliberal thought and briefly explain why it is fatally flawed. On that basis I will then trace this peculiar philosophy to two outcomes: a) its provoking of disasters and b) its undermining the basis for cooperative relations between the public and authority and therefore its increasing reliance upon deception and state-sponsored and state-inspired repression and violence to maintain order. I will then conclude with observations and suggestions about a way out of this ever-expanding disaster. My approach to the matter of the disasters that neoliberalism generates, by the way, differs from that of Naomi Klein, but more on that later.

As to the first point regarding NL’s philosophical foundation:

NL is the political expression of globalization. It could not continue to exist and prevail without the degradation of the meaning of truth. (p. 2)

What is most problematic about globalization isn’t that it widens the gap between those with wealth and those with far less, leaving people in want and creating unnecessary suffering and deaths, or that it rips up the social fabric, or that it is precipitating and accelerating environmental degradation and disasters, endangering the very planet that we live on, or any of the other profound troubles that my book chronicles and analyzes.

These problems are catastrophic on an epic scale – the demolition of society. But to get a handle on what has been happening to us collectively, we have to first be clear about why it is happening and what it is in its totality because if we don’t, we won’t be able to change course. We need to know where we are, how we got here, and why it continues to be so difficult to change course, before we can have a chance to actually change course.

Globalization’s most troublesome dimension is that it is first and foremost based upon a philosophy that distorts the very meaning of truth. Globalization and neoliberalism represent a fundamental attack on humanity’s historic pursuit of truth.

Neoliberals scoff at the notion that there is such a thing as objective reality and objective truth. They believe that through their economic and political power that they can simply manufacture what is true and erase that which they don’t like. Put another way, in their view, might makes right and lack of might means you have no say about what is true and what is right. Might is so mighty, in fact, that it can ignore objective realities and necessities and simply by virtue of might’s strength, dictate what will be true and what people will believe to be true.

As a Bush senior aide put it to Ron Suskind in 2002, explaining that the people in the White House and their supporters were all members of the “faith-based community” rather than the “reality-based community”: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” (p. 4)

Some might wonder if the neoliberals are just pretending to be proponents of the idea that power means that you get to decide what is true. Their rupture with objective reality in their philosophy is in fact profound. They have company in this in two movements that on the surface appear to be oppositional to the neoliberals: Islamic fundamentalism and postmodernism.

The fact that al-Qaeda and its ilk are putative rivals of U.S. imperialism is well known. What might be surprising is that postmodernism shares with the neoliberals anything at all since postmodernists don’t like and are critical of neoliberals’ policies. What religious fundamentalism (of all varieties, including Christian fundamentalism) and postmodernism share with neoliberalism is their common hostility to science and reason and to the foundation which science and reason rest upon: the existence of an objective world outside of human consciousness. There is a difference between saying that interpretation comes into play in everything and saying that all that exists is interpretation.

If an objective world does not exist outside of our consciousness of it, then science is a waste of time in its pursuit of identifying the laws of physics when such a world doesn’t in fact exist outside of our fabrication of it. Postmodernists, like religious faith believers, think that people create truth and facts and that one can choose to believe what one wishes. They believe that power consists of the ability to dictate what others believe to be true. This is in stark contrast to the philosophy and theory that drives science – that the more that we understand about the material world outside of our perception of it, the more freedom we can create out of the necessity that we discover. Humankind has learned how to fly, for example, but we did so by learning about gravity’s realities, studying aerodynamics and thrust, and by designing and manufacturing materials strong and light enough to fly, not by convincing ourselves that we can keep ourselves in the air if we just believe it strongly enough.

One expression of this contempt towards objective reality and the needs of the community, environment, and society is concentrated in a slogan that Tony Hayward used to have sitting on his desk when he was head of BP and before the BP Gulf of Mexico catastrophe. It said: “If you knew you could not fail, what would you try?”

You’d try to drive a stake into the heart of the Gulf of Mexico and not even imagine, let alone properly prepare against, a catastrophic environmental disaster.

Neoliberals, religious fundamentalists, and postmodernists share a similar theory about reality. They believe that if enough people believe something to be true, it makes it true. This is nonsense. Does not knowing that you have AIDS make you safe from dying from AIDS? Does not accepting the necessities attached to the fact that the U.S. is holding you prisoner in a torture facility make you immune to being tortured to death?

These literal textualists (those who believe that truth resides entirely in words) do not believe in necessity. Instead, they are proponents of a version of “freedom” that is separated from having to recognize necessity’s existence.

One of the consequences of that theory/philosophy is the view that if you wish to change society, you must put all of your energies into changing the way people see the world. What is true is true because many people see it that way. So the solution if you want to change things is to get more people to see it the way that you do and once they do, “reality” has been changed.

Neoliberalism is a philosophy – and the politics and policies based on that philosophy – that advocates for and defends the interests of globalization. Those who want to further the process of globalization adopt neoliberalism as their credo. If we are to understand what globalization is, and what the philosophy, politics, and policies are that represent and advocate for globalization, then we have to get clear on what truth is.

Before he was elected, Obama stated that he had studied the Constitution and that his faith in it prompts him to do the right thing about the treatment of prisoners, i.e., reinstate habeas corpus, ban torture, and close Guantanamo. He has not closed and doesn’t appear to ever plan to close Gitmo, has not reinstated habeas corpus and in fact has openly gone further than Bush dared by engaging in preventive detention, and has banned waterboarding but not other forms of torture. This illustrates perfectly that just because a person says that something is does not make it so.

Individuals are often deceived about reality, and more so today than a few decades ago, because of the rise of an extremely influential right-wing media empire that sets the terms overall that other corporate media to a large extent operate within, because neoliberalism’s doctrine is the dominant orthodoxy and because neoliberalism cannot continue to be dominant without the distortion of truth. As a result, all too many people lack the theoretical and conceptual tools that would allow them to distinguish between falsehoods and truths. People must have the tools they need to respond appropriately and effectively to what is going on.

Besides the fact, as Marx put it, that the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class, one’s interpretation of the world is largely influenced by the paradigm(s) he/she adheres to and one’s paradigm is also strongly influenced by one’s material status. A paradigm can be defined as a lens through which one perceives the world/reality. For instance, a person who cannot find regular gainful employment is more likely to perceive himself/herself as a victim of the system, whereas a banker is more likely to perceive himself/herself as a deserving and proud product of the system. The state of mind and conditions of each of these individuals will influence their interpretation of reality; it will lead them to certain conclusions in terms of what they think needs to be done, or not.

For the most part, people are not aware that the paradigms they embrace contain assumptions and value judgments that often misrepresent what is really going in the empirical world. This is why I argue that “coming to grips with what is going on involves facts, but it also involves understanding what different paradigms are based on and the difference it makes which paradigm is used.” (p. 21)

By severing the individual from the group, neoliberal philosophy creates the basis for personal and societal level catastrophes since their pursuit of whatever the individual wants against the group’s needs ruptures the actual relationship between the individual and the group. It can be analogized to cancer cells that behave as if there is no host that they are part of, multiplying themselves heedlessly until they kill the host organism. This also extends into the realm of how one should handle the relationship between humanity and the environment. It is a mutually interdependent relationship rather than one in which humanity can act unilaterally as if it is autonomous. There is much more to be said about this, but I want to now turn to the next part of my presentation.

The question of an unstable social order and the greater likelihood of violence arises because social inequality grows tremendously under neoliberal policies. Corporate profits are enhanced when the working class and middle classes are deprived of alternatives to working at reduced wages, when the social safety net is curtailed or eliminated, and when the whole world becomes capitalism’s warren to roam in search of the lowest wages and where environmental rules are weak to non-existent. When the socialist camp disappeared and capitalism became the only game in town, whole swaths of the American workforce became superfluous from the perspective of capital and the world record-breaking incarceration rates in the U.S. and the more punitive criminal and repressive public order policies become ways of putting under lock and key and surveillance those who would otherwise rebel against their conditions. Under neoliberal regimes, the probability that the public will resist the relentless growth in the ranks of those who are being deprived of opportunity and the very means to life correspondingly grows.

Authorities’ ability to maintain social stability when the material basis for social stability is being undermined across the board by their policies poses itself as an acute and ever-expanding problem, not matter who is in the White House and how convincing his or her rhetoric is. The increasing occurrence of popular upheavals and authorities’ use of force to prevent and put down rebellions and revolutions are both therefore to be expected.

The paradox here is that the rhetoric of prosperity and emphasis on security and the measures enacted to supposedly ensure the public welfare and security are doing the very opposite: the security state rests upon a system and policies that are the greatest source of instability in the world today. The “war on terror” (WOT) in particular employs state terror and feeds a cycle of great violence, both on the individual level and on the societal level. The WOT is itself only a particular product as well as virulent expression of the neoliberal world:

[T]he forces insisting that order is under siege and that repression and extralegal measures are necessary to cope with that disorder are the same forces creating disorder in the society by dispossessing increasing ranks of the people, endangering the planet’s biosystem, and provoking greater and greater levels of social insecurity (p. 153).

The most dangerous aspect of this is not what Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine exposes, that neoliberals are deliberately triggering disasters, as bad as that is and as much as they sometimes do consciously provoke some disasters. The problem is more fundamental and damaging than that: it arises from the very nature of capitalism/imperialism and neoliberalism in particular:

The worst and most alarming news here . . . is not that 9/11 was an inside job, a grand conspiracy hatched within the highest US government echelons. It is instead that 9/11 and other disasters such as the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe are due to the normal and ordinary workings of capitalism, and specifically neoliberal policies. That is much more distressing than believing that 9/11 was an inside job. (p. 163)

This goes deeper, then, than the individuals in charge. It grows out of the dominant systems in place and can only be resolved through a revolutionary systemic change. Why do I say that neoliberalism is the most dangerous movement ever when there are other movements such as that of the fascists of the 1930s and 1940s? Neoliberalism is the doctrine that rules the roost worldwide today and the doctrine endorsed by both the GOP and Democratic Parties – with mostly rhetorical differences between them and their different social bases that require their distinguishing themselves from the other party in order to appeal to their social bases. Even long-existing social democratic countries such as Sweden and New Zealand have been accommodating themselves to and bending to its NL’s will. NL presents today a lethal combination of attributes:

Neoliberals’ hubris and monopoly over state power, their control over resources (both material and ideological), the potency of contemporary technological capacities, and their startling indifference to their policies’ rupturing of the social fabric and endangering the biosphere, make them an unparalleled threat in human history.

Nathan Freier, a DoD analyst, reaches similar conclusions to myself about the dangers here, even though he approaches this from an entirely different perspective. As Freier puts it, “The likeliest and most dangerous future shocks will be unconventional… Their origin is most likely to be in irregular, catastrophic, and hybrid threats of ‘purpose’ (emerging from hostile design) or threats of ‘context’ (emerging in the absence of hostile purpose or design). Of the two, the latter is both the least understood and the most dangerous.” (Bodfacing added, pp. 133-134.)

Corporations operate on the logic that it is cheaper to pay for lawsuit claims against them for wrongful death and injury due to their ignoring or under-responding to safety issues than it is to carry out their businesses with the safety and welfare of the public and environment in mind. Under neoliberal logic, businesses, especially big business, are allowed to now largely self-police rather than being regulated. Since self-policing works as well as any other unsupervised activity (not well!), the normalcourse of business and governmental decisions are now fraught with hidden hazards for the public. The ordinary is now the source of peril.

The financial system is a particular instance of this. As L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City put it in November 2010, describing the situation prior to the 2008 housing market collapse: “In the end, the US financial system (and perhaps many others) became nothing but a massive criminal conspiracy to defraud borrowers.” (p. 174) That criminal conspiracy continues today as the norm.

A further example of this is the problem of global warming and how it is being handled, or better stated, not being handled:

While Obama believes global warming is a danger, the measures being undertaken to slow it fall grievously far below what is necessary at this point. As James Hansen, whose proven track record on anticipating the course of global warmings’ progressive danger signs makes him the most credible scientist around, has forcefully warned, the point of no return has already been passed and emergency measures are needed. In a 2003 report commissioned by Andrew Marshall and written by former Shell Oil Head of Planning Peter Schwartz and California think tank Global Business Network’s Doug Randall, the Department of Defense (DoD) itself warned of the convulsive effects that global warming in the not distant future will wreak in the form of forced migrations of tens of millions and wars over resources critical to actual survival; the DoD described this as a threat “greater than terrorism.”

The research suggests that …adverse weather conditions could develop relatively abruptly, with persistent changes in the atmospheric circulation causing drops in some regions of 5-10 degrees Fahrenheit in a single decade. Paleoclimatic evidence suggests that altered climatic patterns could last for as much as a century, as they did when the ocean conveyor collapsed 8,200 years ago, or, at the extreme, could last as long as 1,000 years as they did during the Younger Dryas, which began about 12,700 years ago. . . .

Rather than decades or even centuries of gradual warming, recent evidence suggests the possibility that a more dire climate scenario may actually be unfolding. . . .

As famine, disease, and weather-related disasters strike due to the abrupt climate change, many countries’ needs will exceed their carrying capacity. This will create a sense of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression in order to reclaim balance. Imagine eastern European countries, struggling to feed their populations with a falling supply of food, water, and energy, eyeing Russia, whose population is already in decline, for access to its grain, minerals, and energy supply. Or, picture Japan, suffering from flooding along its coastal cities and contamination of its fresh water supply, eying Russia’s Sakhalin Island oil and gas reserves as an energy source to power desalination plants and energy-intensive agricultural processes… [Emphasis added.]

The response from the Pentagon’s spokesperson Dan Hetlage to this report was interesting:

We did not expect any White House response to the Pentagon on this report. Andrew Marshall is our Yoda, our big thinker who peers into the future. But it’s all speculation. It was very ethereal, very broad in scope. It wasn’t like, “Oh, wow, that totally debunks the president’s stand on global warming,” because it was merely a thought exercise. We don’t have a crystal ball. We don’t really know.^[i] [Emphasis in the original.]

They “don’t really know.” When astronauts go into space, the backup systems NASA creates to protect the astronauts and their missions are multiple in nature in case the first few fail. The scenarios they run in preparation for outer space travel are diverse and complex. These efforts are protecting a handful of people in space; yet, when the entire planet is at risk, the trigger for action is based on whether or not they know for certain that something will happen. Of course, at the point when the dangers are manifest and present, action in response is much too late. This is the equivalent of packing the entirety of humanity into one big car and those in charge of the welfare of the passengers deciding that they are not going to put on any seatbelts because they do not know for certain that there will be an accident. (Pp. 166-168)

If global warming is, according to the DoD itself, a greater threat than terrorism, then the abject failure to address global warming fully and the corresponding huge diversion of resources to the WOT are catastrophically bad decisions. But the full dimensions of this failure and the dangers that it is sowing are only evident if you are willing to think outside of the box of the authorities’ narrow-minded perspective.

Bureaucracies’ basic characteristics are a contributing factor to this picture. They perpetuate inequalities by promoting subordination, secrecy and deception, and ultimately the concentration of power and the attribution of privileges to elites. They also primarily “focus on process more than on results.”

What does it tell us about the nature of the contemporary and near term future world that disasters that arise out of the very context of our collective lives are a) certain, b) unlikely to be properly foreseen, c) extremely unlikely to be adequately prepared for, and d) more dangerous than any planned hostile actions?

As they laud their respect for the rule of law and for democracy and liberty, neoliberals have been systematically insulating the government and corporate world, especially the highest executive levels, from the people’s opinions and voices, creating an executive that is not accountable or even supervised by any other governmental branch or by the People. This reflects a momentous shift in governmental norms worldwide that begin in the 1970s known as public order policies that treat everyone as a suspect and where governmental coercion can be used upon you pre-emptively, even if you have committed no crime. What was displayed as a dystopian future in the film Minority Report, in other words, is now the emergent standard of governance. These policies have been instituted under the signboard of the “war on terror” but their inception date from before 9/11 and are not being carried out because of anti-state terrorism. This explains the adoption of expressly fascist laws such as Obama’s open use of assassination of those he alone has designated as enemies of the state and the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 that,upon Obama’s request, included American citizens picked up on U.S. soil as among those who can, simply by accusation, be arrested and held indefinitely without a right to challenge their detention.

Neoliberals’ insistence on what amounts to dictatorial powers and their campaign to override the rule of law is necessary because if their true agenda were publicly unveiled, it would go down to ignominious defeat since their agenda means the relentless exploitation of the vast majority of humanity and the pillaging of the environment. Neoliberal policies systematically stick it to the public and deprive them of the means to life. Given this, there is no way that they can stay in power if they don’t utilize increasingly unfettered forms of power. That explains the yawning gap between what they’re doing and what they are saying about what they’re doing: they can only get their way through misrepresentation, manipulation, and force. Authorities’ forcible evictions of the Occupy encampments in spite of and in fact, in significant respect, due to the popularity of Occupy, are an example of authorities’ intolerance for dissent and exposés of their policies.

As people around the world grapple with neoliberal policies’ negative consequences, different ideas contend about what the best path to take is. Some argue that state power is no longer relevant. I argue by contrast that state power is the key focal point of struggle between neoliberals (whether they’re neoconservatives or the “Democratic” version of neoliberalism) and those who want a radically different world. State power remains fundamental. By contrast the outer shell of political power (electoral campaigns, elections, speeches, debates, legislative votes, judicial decisions, and so on) are mainly public relations designed to convey the impression of democratic and lawful decision-making, with the real decision-making occurring behind closed doors.

Violence, at least some degree of violence, is an inherent part of the political struggle and is often the price to pay for social change. One only needs to look at recent revolutions that have occurred throughout the world, such as the end of apartheid in South Africa, or the more recent uprisings in the Middle East, to come to that conclusion.

Neoliberals are implementing public order policies, i.e., policies that are supposedly aimed at preventing the unlikely “generalized and ubiquitous foe,” instead of more tangible and specific public threats. Neoliberals waste a lot of effort and resources in the implementation of those policies, which are damaging to society, and are mostly ineffective and illegal. The overwhelming amount of data collected by intelligence agencies on a daily basis to supposedly thwart potential terrorist threats and hunt down alleged terrorists illustrates this point (on the order of four times as much data collected daily as resides in the entire Library of Congress). One of the main problems with having access to too much irrelevant information is as follows:

If you have too much data, then connecting dots becomes extremely difficult because you have too many possible threads to perceive and millions upon millions of irrelevant data points obscuring those threads. It is like trying to find multiple needles in a haystack while haystack after haystack after haystack is being dropped on you in an avalanche of hay. (p. 151)

No one is exempt of becoming a target of those methods, i.e., anyone can be and in fact everyone is targeted as a suspect. This environment fosters a climate of ubiquitous fear and threat based on nothing but smoke, something that I describe as “a cacophony of threatening noise.” The U.S. government has a huge stake in maintaining that climate of ubiquitous fear and threat because it warrants and legitimizes the need for more social control. In turn, those repressive measures help the government pursue their hidden agenda (i.e., profit-making and increased political power).

The net result of all of this? An inherently unstable and increasingly destabilizing system that generates tremendously damaging endemic and episodically catastrophic results. That is a conclusion that can be reached even if we were to not even consider the question of the inherent injustice of it all.

Instead of ushering a utopia of abundance for all, the triumph of the capitalist world over the socialist camp by the end of the 1980s has brought and is bringing the capitalist dystopia to us, the worst of which is yet to come, but the disastrousness of it is multidimensional and there to be seen by those not blinded to it. There is a way out of this madness. It must be based upon a challenge to the logic of the system itself.

We are not fundamentally solitary, autonomous, and exclusively self-interested individuals driven to maximize personal material rewards; we are beings who are primarily shaped by our relationships, especially those generated by our society’s political and economic structures. Individuals do not principally give systems the character that those systems possess; systems and structures principally shape individuals’ behavior. (p. xi)

Dennis Loo is Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is a Harvard honors graduate in Government and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of “Globalization and the Demolition of Society” and Co-Editor/Author of “Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney”. Website: Dr. Dennis Loo

Authorities pick out official suspects, disallowing any other photographs but those deemed “official.” The authorities ask for the public’s help in identifying the suspects, and then the boy’s mother comes forward saying the FBI has been talking to her son for two years and has been to their home…

And I’m Robert Siegel.

We begin this hour with a major break in the investigation into Monday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon.

RICHARD DESLAURIERS: Today, we are enlisting the public’s help to identify the two suspects. After a very detailed analysis of photo, video and other evidence, we are releasing photos of these two suspects. They are identified as Suspect 1 and Suspect 2. They appeared to be associated. Suspect 1 is wearing a dark hat, Suspect 2 is wearing a white hat. Suspect 2 set down a backpack at the site of the second explosion just in front of the Forum restaurant.

SIEGEL: That’s FBI special agent-in-charge Richard DesLauriers at a news conference earlier today. For more on this story, we’re joined by NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston. And, Dina, the headline out of this briefing isn’t just the images, but one word that we heard seven times in that 30-second clip, suspect.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON, BYLINE: That’s right. For the first time since Monday’s bombing, there are suspects. The FBI released these photographs of these two 20-something men in hoodies and baseball caps. And they didn’t just call them individuals of interest, they call them suspects, and that’s meaningful. It means they have enough data to actually charge these men with something. The FBI appealed to the public to help identify them, and they warned – and I thought this was significant – that they considered them armed and extremely dangerous.

Explosions at Boston Marathon – NPR

Only there’s little truth in it — this is helicopters and Montag. And this time it’s real! The narrative is quite simple: the police did a good job and what they did was right. The first responders and those on the scene were heroes and we must come together as a nation. Intentionally, the suspect was not read his Miranda rights to validate his enemy combatant status, then once in place they need only to expand its meaning, opening it up like an umbrella, as one day you’re stopped by police and asked, “Where’s the terrorist-fire buddy?”

It is the most extraordinary and most frightening event I’ve ever witnessed, with surreal echoes of the same 9-11 narratives blasted across the media, like reruns playing the heartstrings of memory. The Twin Towers were buildings that were destroyed; this missile is aimed straight at the heart of civil society as a whole. It’s almost unprecedented; except for that one time, when some generals tried to kill Hitler and the Home Army was used to secure Berlin.

Then lickity-split, the story changes and changes again, authorities will read him his Miranda rights and the suspect has been cooperative. Gee, I guess if the story changes often enough, no one will ever know the truth.

The bleeding suspect, on foot, eludes police during a lock down. When he is finally located, he’s hiding in a boat and police have thermal imaging available of the interior of the boat. They fire between 30 to 50 rounds into the boat before the suspect emerges cussing and now, there’s a question if he will ever speak again? To lock down a city, for what purpose? Either these people in charge are fools or there is something else going on here. If there had been no lock-down in force, Dzhokar Tamerlan might have been located hours sooner; it was after all, a civilian who located him and paid the price with his boat. Remember that, the next time you think a terrorist suspect might be hiding in your boat.

That is the really frightening part. The part where you begin to think seriously about leaving the country. When you back track it, the narrative is ominous; the economy has been gutted, hollowed out through Free Trade and tax cuts, with the unemployed having the greatest tax cut of all, paying nothing. Gladly, they would love to pay taxes; I myself would be proud to pay taxes. I’d be proud to pay taxes on Obama’s $608,000 income. Could you imagine, making $11,000 per week and a free house! I don’t fault them for it really, I just wanted to reference the word “isolated.” But a poor country can’t afford to pay out benefits, now can it?

So sooner or later the axe will fall. Already Obama has sent up the trial balloon and these days, like it or not, when the trial balloon goes up, the real balloon will shortly follow. It’s no longer guns or butter; they don’t need any butter if they’ve guns to point at you. We have witnessed the treatment meted out nationwide to the peaceful Occupy movement and this weekend we’ve witnessed a military takeover of an American city and the million dollar question is… why? Was this an exercise, or was this an exercise of an even larger exercise? They’re planning more exercises you know, in Washington and in two other US cities in May. I guess, because the money is burning a hole in their pockets.

I just wonder why a really sharp guy, who was given a scholarship by the City of Cambridge and was a sophomore at UMass, would build bombs from a pressure cooker? A pressure cooker is a heavy steel or iron pot, reinforced to handle high pressures; an explosion is an uncontrolled release of high pressure. Why use a reinforced steel vessel, unless its purpose was to blow straight up into the air? The lid of one pressure cooker was found on the roof of an adjacent building. There were bombs, of that, there is no doubt. These bombs were very ineffective either by luck or by design and we’re just ever so lucky these days, aren’t we?

Just what does above the law really mean? Of course, it means you can park in handicapped spaces, but say you had a business competitor who’d been giving you a hard time and you just couldn’t get rid of them… well, maybe they’ll have a fire at their fertilizer plant. To be above the law is to make all else subservient. To seize and hold a town under near martial law conditions looking for a criminal is to make the citizens afraid and subservient to law enforcement. I don’t care if this nineteen-year-old was the reincarnation of Bruce Lee and Our Man Flint; one small police force should be adequate.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward. ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

About the Author: David Glenn Cox is a senior staff writer for TLR and an award winning author and musician; he is the author of the novel, “The Servants of Pilate”.

I continued to review physicians I know to be gaming the system and hurting patients, and yet many of them received spectacular ratings from their patients. I wondered how this could be, for about five seconds, until I realized these docs were likely working these on-line rating services as much as they were taking advantage of their patients and gaming the healthcare system.

There are many doctor rating sites on-line that appear to generate revenue through ads placed on the site or by a fee doctors pay so that they can be a sponsored or recommended physician.

I decided to go to these sites and began with www.Healthgrades.com. They claim to be the leading independent health care ratings company. I went to my name, typed in my review of myself (gave myself a good rating) and noted it posted shortly after. Hmm.

I then went to another site called Vitals.com. I posted a review of myself to see if this was at all vetted. I wrote, “Born in upper Mongolia, he lived with the chimps for one hundred years. Then after a bite from a snake he was transformed into a man from Brooklyn. Use caution on all these sites.” A few moments later my review was posted.

UComparehealthcare.com is another site where anyone, that likely includes friends or even the doctor, can post whatever they wish, even if they never visited the doctor. And again, this site collects revenue from physicians who wish to be a “featured” doctor.

Zocdoc.com provides reviews of physicians who sign a contract with them. Doctors that pay for this service are featured on their site and patients can even book appointments directly through Zocdoc. If a physician does not subscribe, he is not featured — it costs $250 dollars a month to be a featured physician. I spoke to a representative at this site who told me that a doctor “was not required to be board certified in his field to be recommended.” In my opinion, the first question any patient should ask is whether a physician is board certified, and if the answer is no — consider another option.

One good thing about Zocdoc.com, in my opinion, is that even though featured doctors are suggested because they pay a hefty fee, and not because of their credentials or quality of care, it appears to be one of the few sites where patient reviews are actually vetted and certified by their staff. In one review, even though the doctor was a client and paying his hefty fee, I did notice critical and quite derogatory reviews; one of which included the following: “absolutely horrible. my xrays were taken as soon as I got there but then they sent me back in the waiting room for 3 hours!! This process was done for everyone. There were a ton of people in the waiting room and every time someone asked the receptionist how much longer, he told them 15-20 minutes (which was a complete lie). do not waste your time here!!”

Doctor rating sites appear to be a useful tool for naïve people who are searching for a qualified physician, but there is no vetting of patient recommendations and sometimes the worst and most dangerous physicians appear to be the best. For most of these sites, all any physician needs to do, and it seems many have, is to either ask friends to post great reviews for them or even post their own review.

As for the review at www.vitals.com, I was not born in Mongolia and I did not live with chimps for one hundred years, but I am from Brooklyn.

Dr. Evan S. Levine is a cardiologist in New York and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center – Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is also the author of the book “What Your Doctor Won’t (or can’t) Tell You”. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and children.

Only Nixon could go to China – Mr. Spock, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

President Barack Obama’s proposal of cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, especially the infamous “chained CPI”, was a “Nixon to China” moment in American politics. The answer to the question “How could he get away with it?” is actually easy. Presidents in their second term can do things only a lame duck would dare. The more interesting and important question is why he would do such a thing, especially as he has been considered generally a liberal, and to his enemies even a socialist.

On the surface, the answer to “why?” is also easy. He has likely reached the end of his political career. Only John Quincy Adams went to Congress after being president. Most presidents lived a quiet life of retirement after their terms in the White House.

Barack Obama is a young man as presidents go, and he can look forward to many years of productive activity after his second term ends. One thing men in his position do, beside writing memoirs, is to make lots of money giving speeches. He can ensure himself a lucrative post-presidential career of speechmaking by pleasing those who are most likely to extend invitations that would pay handsome honoraria. These people are likely to be the very wealthy business leaders who helped him get elected president in the first place. He did not get to where he is today by being a community organizer or even a constitutional law professor. He got to this position by catering to the extremely wealthy people who are the powers that name our presidents. How else would a young man, fairly unknown at the national level, not yet through one full term as a US Senator, and black, get elected President? It wasn’t simply $5 and $10 Internet donations.

Candidates now spend staggering sums of money each election cycle, putting on their version of the electoral “dog and pony” show, but if we want to vote for the winner, our choices of candidates are limited to two that are declared by the mainstream media (90% of which is owned by six corporations), as viable: one Democrat and one Republican.

There is nothing in our Constitution that requires parties at all. Parties are one of those facts of political life. Parties are born of factions. James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution”, said, in Federalist number 10:

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulses of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

The faction that most resembles that remark is the faction of oligarchs, the kind of people who go each year to meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or the Bilderberg Group.

Today, the Democratic and Republican parties are two heads of one corporate puppet party controlled by that faction, According to the Center for Responsive Politics, “[a]bout 47 percent of Congress, or 249 current members are millionaires. … Fully 36 Senate Democrats, and 30 Senate Republicans reported an average net worth in excess of $1 million in 2010.”

More Senate Democrats than Republicans are millionaires…Hmmm.

But being a former President of the United States has a cachet that transcends party in the international business and academic circles we can expect Obama to travel in after January 20, 2017. He need not be concerned about his financial future or that of his children. So why is he willing to go along with attacking some of the most popular programs in American history, programs that help our elderly live their remaining lives with dignity?

All of the talk of the need to be bipartisan is just claptrap. Obama squandered the opportunity he was given in 2008. Or did he? The answer to that question depends on what you thought he was going to do. Having been given a landslide victory and control of both houses of Congress in 2008, he could have changed the country’s course 180 degrees from where Ronald Reagan steered the ship of state after the 1980 election. Instead of being concerned that his initiatives would be filibustered in the Senate because he had a majority, but did not have 60 votes with which to invoke cloture, he should have dared the Republicans to shut down the government as Bill Clinton did when Newt Gingrich tried to render the President irrelevant after the 1994 elections. But he did neither.

The deeper answer is that Obama agrees with those who believe government exists first and foremost to safeguard the wealth-aggregating abilities of the nation’s (and the world’s) most powerful people and institutions. That is why he was never serious about a public option for health insurance. He is what leftists had feared 2008 Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain would be: Bush Term III. In fact, Obama may be worse. Neither Bush nor McCain would have suggested what Obama is suggesting. Only Nixon could go to China. Only someone who calls himself a Democrat could think to touch the third rail of American politics and emerge unscathed.

He takes a few small steps, like signing the Lily Ledbetter Act, saying (finally) that he’s for same-sex marriage and that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional, and that the minimum wage should be raised, albeit to a puny $9 an hour. But his overall administration is one of continuing and extending ongoing abuses of power that we often blame on Republicans but of which Democrats are just as guilty: Outrageous military spending, a major reduction of which would still leave the United States as the world’s biggest military spender, yet go a long way to reducing the deficit; drone warfare, which kills innocent civilians while leaving the joystick-wielding computer gamers stateside and untouched; compulsory health insurance or IRS penalties—remember when he denied the penalties were a tax? Sequestration was his idea. And now he is trying to tell us that we can’t afford to be giving cost of living adjustments to our seniors, the disabled and veterans the way we have been. The COLA that went into effect for Social Security and SSI in January 2013 was 1.7%. (That’s the federal government’s equivalent of finding quarters between the sofa cushions!)

That a Democrat says and does these things lends legitimacy to the claims of Republicans like Paul “what’s he still doing in Congress” Ryan, Rand Paul and their ilk, because most of the American people just swallow the sound bites fed to them by corporate media. Those sound bites are saying that the President has to play ball with the likes of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-OH). The sound bites, sometimes quoting Obama, also say that we have to be more competitive in the world economy. All that means is that we try to take the lead in the race to the bottom, so that the likes of the Walton Family of Walmart can get richer.

I understand why African Americans voted for Obama in 2008. I don’t understand why any non-black liberal did so in 2008 and any liberal of any color did so in 2012. African Americans — everyone, in fact — would do well to start paying attention to programs such as the Black Agenda Report. I strongly suggest to liberals of any color to stop voting by a person’s skin color or gender—yes, Hillary voters, I mean you—and start helping to break up the Republicrat monopoly over this nation’s politics by voting third parties and independents. Do not believe the late Margaret Thatcher, who said “There is no other alternative.” There will be alternatives when we stop believing there are none.

We also have to stop thinking short term. The extreme rightwing is reaping the benefits of political organizing that goes back to at least 1964. The powers that be will always create a new short-term emergency or a new enemy, to keep our eyes and minds off the real issue: long term, the structure of our economics and foreign policies are not viable if you want to see the US as part of a just, peaceful and prosperous world. The powers that be, for whom Obama is managing the US at the moment, don’t want that. They want us angry and suspicious of each other, so that they can con us into believing we do need those cuts in social programs, we do need to let the rich have more tax breaks, we do need those drones for our security. While we fight over crumbs, they’re eating the whole pie.

Kellia Ramares-Watson is an independent journalist in Oakland, CA. She voted for Dennis Kucinch in the 2008 California presidential primary even though he had dropped out of the Presidential Race two days earlier. She voted for Cynthia McKinney that November. Ramares-Watson was unaffiliated and thus did not vote in the 2012 Califirnia Primary. She later registered for the California Pirate Party, and voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party for President in 2012 Ramares-Watson can be reached to theendofmoney[at]gmail.com

[The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act] and other bills focus on economic loss. And when we start talking about the loss of profits, the most significant threat to those profits in recent years has not been broken windows, it has been activists who have actually been opening windows into how these operations work by creating video footage.

How does someone who is a modern day muckraker become a terrorist?

How does the U.S. President, a man who ran on a platform of hope and change, maintain a “kill list” and declare that he has the right to assassinate anyone he pleases as long as he regards them as “terrorists,” including Americans?

How does Congress pass laws like the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 that allows the military to strip anyone based merely upon an accusation, of their American citizenship if they’re an American citizen, and all of those accused, of any rights at all, including the right to habeas corpus, and subject them to possible indefinite and preventive detention?

How does the Defense Department without a trace of sarcasm or irony, train all of its employees that legal, peaceful protest is “low-level terrorism?”

The answer to these questions can be summarized in two bullet points:

1. Free-market fundamentalism (aka neoliberalism) rests upon the logic of depriving the vast majority of the populace of economic and physical security so that big corporations can make more profits;
2. Neoliberalism became the ruling doctrine when the one major rival and alternative to capitalism and imperialism, socialism, was erased from the world scene. When the socialist camp disappeared, along with the decline of vibrant unions and powerful insurgent social movements, the capitalists no longer had to make any concessions to the working class or middle class and could dictate the terms as they saw fit. This is why we see as one aspect of the present the re-emergence in increasingly naked form of the most reactionary ideas and practices such as overt, grotesque racism (e.g., Trayvon Martin’s murder because of his color), blatant misogyny, and anti-rationalist know-nothingism.

From my book, Globalization and the Demolition of Society:

Because neoliberalism produces growing disparities within the populace inside nations, between nations, and between regions, it demands and requires the increasingly generous application of force, intimidation, and deception to defend these disparities. Because persuading people to cooperate and follow the rules based on positive incentives is less and less an option since positive incentives themselves are being sharply cut back, negative incentives are necessarily being employed more and more to maintain social control. These negative incentives take two fundamental forms: fearmongering and coercion. Frighten the people about some external and internal enemies and strong-arm them into believing that extraordinary measures must be adopted to deal with these enemies, including unconstitutional and extralegal surveillance, detention, preemptive raids and invasions, rewriting laws to suit an unrestrained state, arrests of demonstrators before they demonstrate and exercise their First Amendment rights and charging them as “terrorists,” beatings, torture, murder, and assassination. These are the new politics, endorsed and employed by both major parties; they are used more explicitly by the GOP, but the distinction between the two parties is only of tone, not overall of kind.

Convincing people that they should support (or at least not actively oppose) public policies that are against their interests via ideological and political stratagems continues to be important, and the ways in which this is being carried out deserve their own chapter (see Chapter Six). But because of the increasing gap between the representation and the actuality, and because the winners in this game grow fewer and fewer relative to the losers (with the winners a fraction of the top one percent and the really big winners almost few enough to fit into a palatial mansion), propaganda can only go so far; coercion and intimidation must assume an increasingly larger burden in the exercise of social control. Moreover, persuasion itself has more and more taken on the form of cynical manipulation through fear-mongering and more extensive lying and censorship. Playing to and feeding the public’s fears fosters people’s primitive emotional states that supplant rational decision-making. When you are aroused by fear, your ability to think rationally is compromised.

Again, from Globalization and the Demolition of Society:

[H]ere is the USA PATRIOT Act’s definition for a new crime dubbed “domestic terrorism”: “acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United State or of any State . . . [that] . . . appear to be intended . . . (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. . . .”[i]

Obviously, by this definition any act of civil disobedience and any political protest could be readily categorized as “domestic terrorism,” since they are all designed to influence government policy… Lobbyists, for their part, obviously intend to influence government policy. The USA PATRIOT Act’s definition for “domestic terrorism” is so broad that it robs the term “terrorism” of all real meaning and makes it instead a catchall label that can be used against any dissenters or advocates of policy disliked by those in power. Environmental or animal rights activists, for example, do not target people. What they engage in might more properly be described as sabotage. Yet because a spray can might blow up while a saboteur is using it to deface a Humvee, for example, the activists could be (and have been) classified as “ecoterrorists” or “domestic terrorists.” If truckers, to use a different example, were to engage in a strike action or demonstration in which they used their trucks to block traffic in DC for an hour or more, this could arguably be seen as dangerous to human life and a form of intimidation or coercion and treated as terrorism. Indeed, a few years ago demonstrators in Salt Lake City were prosecuted as “domestic terrorists” for interfering with the retail sales of commercial businesses on the street where they were demonstrating. Simply put, the USA PATRIOT Act’s definition of terrorism renders the term meaningless except as an amorphous bogeyman.

…

Magnus Hornqvist observed in the “Birth of Public Order Policy” in 2004:

Over the last twenty years, the nature of the rule of law and the basis on which nation states employ force has been changing fundamentally. The distinction between what is criminal, to be dealt with by the legal and justice system, and what creates a ‘perception of insecurity’—formerly to be dealt with by social policy—is being eroded at both the macro (‘war on terror’) and micro (‘public order’) levels. This paves the way for the unbridled use of state force, in the first instance, and the criminalisation of behaviours that are not necessarily illegal, in the second. Fear becomes a controlling mechanism for the maintenance of the social order and any element of non-conformity is construed as a threat.[ii]

The ratcheting up of social control measures in alleged response to terrorism occurred before 9/11 and the various incidents that are commonly cited as lead-up terrorist incidents to 9/11 (e.g., the February 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center; the October 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole in Yemen; the 2001 suicide bombing murder of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud). The discourse of fear, the criminalization of previously noncriminal behaviors (including constitutionally protected free speech and protest), the massive covert government and private corporate surveillance of lawful activities and persons, and the increasing incarceration rate, all began in earnest before 9/11 and the “War on Terror.”

Why has this happened? [Magnus] Hornqvist argues as follows:

With the end of the cold war, the threat of military invasion disappeared in the prosperous nations of the world; since then, defence analysts have sought new areas in which to carry out their work and have been diagnosing new security risks. They have fastened on to courting catastrophe and sabotaging everyday security.

Muslim fundamentalism, poverty, the narcotics trade, streams of migration and political protest. These phenomena are at once both local and global. The illicit drugs found in every municipality are produced across great stretches of the globe, with the drug trade woven into the world economy. Refugees and asylum seekers may be found in virtually every municipality; at the same time, migration flows follow patterns of global conflict and the demand for cheap labour. As a consequence, it is judged increasingly meaningless to distinguish between internal and external security issues, to distinguish between threats and risks on the basis of whether they come from outside or inside the country.

The risks and threats on which these analyses focus are not military in nature. Neither drugs nor refugees constitute a security threat in any traditional sense. The central factor is not the potential for violence. Instead, the problem is of a more political character. … It is a question of intent.

To determine whether an act is terrorist, one cannot merely look at the act itself; the underlying motive must also be examined.[iii]

Hornqvist makes two main points in the preceding. First, the Cold War’s end required military-related enterprises within and outside of government to find other justifications for their activities and expenditures. Second, the new alleged threats are simultaneously local and global in nature, and defining them as terrorist threats has to do with who and what these people and groups are, not their intent and their actions.

The Cold War’s end has had, it is true, the effect of necessitating that military-related activities find other “threats” to justify their existence. This is in keeping with the customary nature of bureaucracies: bureaucracies do not commit suicide; they find ways to persist even when the original reason for their existence disappears. There is, however, an over-arching, more important and compelling dynamic at work here: capitalism is a system that requires, but also exceeds, the specific demands of its military arm. To pursue profit and profit-making opportunities, military force is necessary, but military expenditures in and of themselves do not nearly account for capitalism’s expansionist nature and aims. Wars, for example, are not waged just because or principally because some military suppliers make a lot of money from selling arms. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 did not happen mainly because Halliburton stood to gain from the invasion and occupation. Wars, in fact, create tremendous strains upon a nation’s economy as a whole and on the social fabric. (For more on this key point, see Chapter Two.)

As to Hornqvist’s second point—the actors’ intent—his point here would be more accurate if he had made it clear that the definition of terrorism has to do with the definers’ intent. (He states this more clearly later: “It is more a question of who succeeds in establishing their definition of the situation and less one of what the threat really consists of. The security risks may be real or fictitious; it does not matter which—what they actually are or what they were to begin with—since they are what they have been made into and it is in this capacity that they exercise their effect.”)36

The very fact that poor people, migrants, Muslims, drug dealers, and political protestors are all included in this list of potential “terrorists”—justifying surveillance over them all and the rousing of nativist sentiments against them—reveals a momentous and explicit shift in how public officials and opinion-makers govern. In an economy in which some must be poor because capitalism and poverty are co- occurring and mutually reinforcing phenomena—capitalism requires that some be unemployed and therefore willing to work for less in order to survive—and where migrant labor fuels economic activity like arteries keep a person alive, the criminalization of these indispensible groups reflects a deeply troubling facet of our contemporary world. The marginalized groups are told, in effect, “We need you to exist as you do, for you make us rich and comfortable, but the very fact of your existence renders you a suspect, a criminal and a possible terrorist.” The poor and immigrants are therefore equally as indispensible as they are intolerable.

This means, as I further state in GDS:

[A]ttempts to restore the rule of law will not succeed as a strategy separate from a fundamental challenge to the entire logic of the system itself.

We cannot, in other words, reverse these trends short of a challenge to the whole system through (primarily) going outside of the existing channels and processes and dismantling and replacing the entire system with a system that is based on meeting human needs and safeguarding the planet and all of its denizens rather than one based on exploitation and the relentless and ruthless pursuit of profit.

Being “realistic” and choosing the “lesser evil” of the Democrats and Barack Obama has shown what a bankrupt strategy that is. Those who celebrated Obama’s victory over Romney do not realize that the limiting of choices to those who the system will allow to be put forward as “choices” is no choice at all for the people. As long as the people allow themselves to be restricted to the options that authorities grant us – such as elections – we will never be freed from false saviours. Isn’t it time for us to grow up politically and cast aside useless and harmful illusions? When officialdom claims that any of those who speak out against and dare to expose their practices are “terrorists” deserving of death and/or being thrown into the slammer indefinitely, what self-respecting citizen would not rise in passionate opposition to this and where this has been and will take us all as a society? As my website’s slogan puts it: Sometimes asking for the impossible is the only realistic path.

Dennis Loo is Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is a Harvard honors graduate in Government and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of “Globalization and the Demolition of Society” and Co-Editor/Author of “Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney”. Website: Dr. Dennis Loo

Margaret Thatcher died Monday, April 8, 2013, at the age of 87. Predictably, there is no dearth of hagiographic profiles of the former British Prime Minister in the mainstream press and scathing vitriol elsewhere. But while The Economist hails Thatcher for her “willingness to stand up to tyranny” and Barack Obama calls her “one of the great champions of freedom and liberty,” it should be remembered that, throughout her career, Thatcher was a staunch supporter of many of the world’s most brutal regimes, propping up and arming war criminals and dictators in service to Western imperialism, anti-Communism and neoliberal hegemony.Throughout the 1980s, Thatcher’s government backed Iraq during its war against Iran, funneling weapons and equipment to Saddam Hussein in contravention of both international law and British policy, all the way up until Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. She even sent Christmas cards to both Saddam and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 1981.

During her first trip to Israel in 1965, less than two decades after the Nakba and while Palestinians still lived under martial law, Thatcher spoke highly of Israelis for “their sense of purpose and complete dedication, their pioneer spirit, and their realism.” She later advocated that Palestinian self-determination be realized within the context of “some kind of federation with Jordan,” which she deemed “the best and most acceptable solution.”

In 1986, Thatcher said of Golda Meir, who not only denied the Palestinian right of return but also the existence of Palestinians in general, “I greatly admired her. I greatly admired her as a war leader. I greatly admired her tremendous courage. I greatly admired her as a pioneer. I greatly admired her as a great human being, warm, thoughtful, kind, for all her fellow citizens and for human kind in the world as a whole.”

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s a review of some of her other pals…

In April 1978, prior to her ascension to Prime Minister, Thatcher visited the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in Tehran where she praised him as “one of the world’s most far-sighted statesmen, whose experience is unrivaled.”

Despite the popular protests against the Shah occurring across Iran with increasing frequency, Thatcher said of her host, “No other world leader has given his country more dynamic leadership. He is leading Iran through a twentieth century renaissance.” Exactly one month before her visit, street protests in over 55 Iranian cities resulted in the killing of more than 100 civilians, when police opened fire on the crowds.

Iran “holds a key strategic position in the defence of the Western World,” Thatcher continued, “Her strength and resolve are vital to our future.” She added, “Iran has been the West’s most resolute and stalwart ally in this crucial region.”Upon his overthrow the following February, the Shah expressed his desire to seek asylum in England at his lavish country estate in Surrey. While the British government at the time wound up secretly helping the Shah make his way from Morocco to the Bahamas, it rejected his request to enter the UK.

Thatcher, who became Prime Minister soon thereafter, respected the decision of her predecessor for political reasons, but was “deeply unhappy” that Britain could not offer sanctuary to Pahlavi, whom she called a “firm and helpful friend.”

Thatcher and Hosni Mubarak, 1981

A longtime supporter of the Egyptian dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, Thatcher once received a memo from the UK Foreign Office referring to Mubarak as “no intellectual but…always friendly and cheerful,” noting that while “apt to express simplistic views, he has become an experienced and accomplished political operator.” The brief continued, “His affable exterior evidently conceals a degree of ruthlessness since it seems likely that he has conducted some successful political infighting to maintain his position” having “succeeded in ousting or at least surviving all other prominent figures in the government or armed forces.”

“Nevertheless his reputation is free of any taint of corruption or malpractice and he is not thought to have made many enemies,” the memo said of Mubarak, adding that he was “eager to improve relations with the Royal Air Force and to buy British [military] equipment.”

Thatcher was only too happy to oblige.

Over the years of her leadership, Thatcher routinely commended Mubarak for his “courage” and “strength.” In 1985, at a banquet in Cairo, she said she “admire[d] particularly, Mr. President, the leadership which you personally…have shown.” Five years later, while hosting Mubarak and his wife at No. 10 Downing Street, Thatcher declared, “You are among our very favourite visitors because we all know you as particularly good and close friends of this country, as we are of Egypt,” and once again expressed her admiration for the Egyptian president, this time for his “incredible energy.”

“You are as full of beans as ever,” she said. Unfortunately for the Egyptian people over the next 11 years, thanks largely to American and British largesse, she was right.

Thatcher and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet

Thatcher was a steadfast defender of Augusto Pinochet, whose unspeakably brutal dictatorship of torture and repression terrorized Chile from 1973 to 1990. She visited Pinochet in 1999 during his house arrest in England, saying that her country “owed” him “a great debt” of gratitude for his help during the 1982 Falklands War.

Without any sense of irony, Thatcher added, “I’m also very much aware that it is you who brought democracy to Chile.”

Never one to mention his appalling human rights record, Thatcher expressed her “outrage at the callous and unjust treatment” of Pinochet during a speech that October at the Conservative Party Conference, called him “this country’s only political prisoner,” and hailed him as Britain’s “staunch, true friend in our time of need” and “who stopped the communists taking Chile.”

The next year, upon his release and return to Chile, for which she fought tirelessly, Thatcher sent Pinochet a silver Armada dish as a gift, condemned his detention in England as “a great injustice” and wished the deposed dictator and his family “all good wishes for a peaceful and secure future.”

When Pinochet died six years later, Thatcher said she was “deeply saddened” by his passing.

Subsequently, Robin Harris, a former official in Thatcher’s administration, wrote in The Telegraph that Thatcher “took a positive view of Pinochet’s 17 years in power” and “would not have spoken up for him if she had believed him a monster. She could not judge the merits of every allegation. But, clearly, the legal case against him was weak and the motivation of those involved suspect.”

Harris similarly praised Pinochet for “[leaving] behind a stable democracy,” concluding that “Margaret Thatcher has nothing to be ashamed of in defending Augusto Pinochet, when others refused to do so” and that Pinochet “was lucky to find such a champion.”  

Photo caption: with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, March 25, 1987 (Corbis)

In March 1987, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, visited Thatcher. Beforehand, Thatcher said in an interview, “Relations between Saudi Arabia and Britain are excellent. We have common interests in peace and stability in the Middle East. The Al Yamamah Project for the sale of Tornado and other aircraft to Saudi Arabia has done much to focus Saudi attention on Britain and British attention on Saudi Arabia.”

The Al Yamamah arms deal, signed a year and a half earlier, was “the biggest export transaction in British history, estimated by a British Aerospace executive in 2005 to be worth £83 billion in past and future sales to Saudi Arabia of military hardware including aircraft ranging from Tornado fighters and Hawk trainer jets to Eurofighter Typhoons,” in addition to a wide range of arms, naval vessels, radar, spare parts, and a pilot-training program.

Photo caption: with King Khalid of Saudi Arabia, 1981

The deal was largely the result of Thatcher’s own lobbying initiative on behalf of the British defense industry and weapons manufacturers and, ever since its signing, allegations of corruption, fraud and bribery have abounded.

The very next year, Zia dissolved Pakistan’s National Assembly and dismissed his appointed Prime Minister Muhammad Khan Junejo for signing the Geneva Accords and not sufficiently supporting his continued Islamization projects.

Photo caption: Thatcher and Suharto, 1985

In the midst of the bloody Indonesian occupation of East Timor, Thatcher visited genocidal Indonesian dictator General Suharto, praised Indonesia’s “agricultural and industrial development” and, although East Timorese had been killed, starved, disappeared and herded into “resettlement camps” as part of Suharto’s “encirclement and annihilation” campaign, dismissed allegations of human rights abuses, explaining that East Timor was none of Britain’s business and that Suharto himself has “assured me that the International Red Cross not only had access to East Timor, but was very welcome there.”

She told the press, “Trade brings us together and identifies our interests, and I am sure that trade between Indonesia and Britain will increase as a result of the very friendly and warm atmosphere created by my visit here. We are clearly the best of friends and there is no sounder basis on which to construct future collaboration.”

In 2008, veteran journalist John Pilger recalled that Thatcher referred to Suharto as, “One of our very best and most valuable friends,” and how, “[f]or three decades the south-east Asian department of the Foreign Office worked tirelessly to minimise the crimes of Suharto’s gestapo, known as Kopassus, who gunned down people with British-supplied Heckler & Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica ‘riot control’ vehicles.”

“A Foreign Office speciality was smearing witnesses to the bombing of East Timorese villages by British-supplied Hawk aircraft – until Robin Cook was forced to admit it was true. Almost a billion pounds in export credit guarantees financed the sale of the Hawks, paid for by the British taxpayer while the arms industry reaped the profit,” Pilger adds.

With this kind of record, it is clear that Thatcher’s constantly pledged support for “freedom and democracy” was really a violent, imperial campaign waged for free markets and domination.

(Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at Wide Asleep in America)